PAIS Workshop Stanford

Scholars from around the world gathered for the first official Philosophy, AI, and Society (PAIS) Workshop at Stanford University on January 27th and 28th. The program featured 24 presentations on a wide variety of topics including online privacy, speech muffling on digital platforms, fairness metrics for algorithms, the impact of video deepfakes on evidence, moral self-correction in large language models, the ethics of future porn, and many more. Professors Reginia Rini of York University and Karina Vold of the University of Toronto offered keynote presentations about the impact of digital technologies on autonomy and the capacity of artificial intelligence for artistic creativity respectively.

Funding provided by the ANU’s MINT Lab and the HMI Project and the Stanford McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society enabled early career researchers ranging from PhDs to assistant professors to travel from Australia, North America, and Europe to present at the workshop. Attendance was open to people from any area, but accepted presentations were required to have a philosophical focus.

Seth Lazar of the ANU and Stanford’s Rob Reich oversaw the PAIS workshop’s development, while research fellows Sean Donahue from the MINT Lab and Linda Eggert from Oxford University provided organizational support. Seth and Rob hope the success of the event will help the PAIS workshop to become an annual gathering that contributes to developing the burgeoning field of the normative philosophy of computing.

The PAIS Network is a group of organizations that includes the Institute for Ethics in AI at University of Oxford, the Schwartz Reisman Institute at University of Toronto, Human-Centered AI at Stanford University, the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard College, the Center for Human Values at Princeton University, and the School of Philosophy at Australian National University.